While major Big Box retailers have struggled to keep pace with consumer-driven demands for instant gratification, Sears Holdings has come up with new innovations to anticipate and serve shoppers with a new one-day ground delivery service supported by a dynamic DC network.

When an industry is changing rapidly, companies must adapt in order to survive. In this whitepaper, a global publisher was seeking a partner that could mitigate risk and build a platform flexible enough for their shifting customer expectations. The solution enabled the company to rewrite their operations game plan and transform their supply chain.

Join our panel of leading economic and transportation analysts as they share their exclusive insight on where rates are headed and the issues that will be driving those rate increases over the next 12 months.

Companies are continually finding new ways to get the right goods to the right customers at the right time, and have developed many metrics to measure their performance in these areas. Most of these metrics show distribution productivity and accuracy are improving over time, which keeps raising the bar for service levels. For example, from 2007 to 2008, companies reduced their average days on hand of finished goods inventory from 35 days to 28, reduced dock-to-dock cycle time by 2.5 hours, and reduced days of sales outstanding from 40 days to 35, all while maintaining 98 percent fill rates.

Customers demand continuous improvement, and markets reward it. In 2007 the 25 companies with the best supply chains (as measured by AMR Research) greatly outperformed the S&P 500, producing an average total return of 17.9 percent, compared to 3.5% for the S&P.2 Companies with perfect order rates (a popular metric that measures customer orders that arrive complete, on time, undamaged, and with an accurate invoice) of 80 percent or higher are three times more profitable than companies with perfect order rates of 60 percent, a separate AMR Research study found.3 Better perfect order performance also correlates strongly to higher corporate earnings per share (EPS) and return on assets (ROA), the same study found.

This white paper explains how each aspect of perfect order performance can be improved through enhancements to data collection processes and technologies.

Download this paper:Using Technologies to Increase Perfect Order Metrics

Recent Entries

When an industry is changing rapidly, companies must adapt in order to survive. In this whitepaper, a global publisher was seeking a partner that could mitigate risk and build a platform flexible enough for their shifting customer expectations. The solution enabled the company to rewrite their operations game plan and transform their supply chain.

While it is already reaping myriad benefits from ORION (On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation), a proprietary routing platform for its drivers rolled out in late 2013, transportation and logistics bellwether UPS announced big plans for the technology this week.